Actually, I don't think that metallic hydrogen is twice as dense as solid lead.
If you look at most metals, the higher the atomic weight, the higher the density of the solid. Depleted uranium is heavy, while Aluminium is lightweight, and Lithium is half the density of water, for example. So for hydrogen, metallic or not, to be denser than lead, you need it to be packed tighter than, I think, is physically possible.
At some quick maths, a hydrogen atom is 1, lead is 207-208 (82 protons and a load of neutrons.) I know that some mass is actually in the binding energy between those, but for some quick and very approximative maths let's say a lead atom is 200 times heavier than a hydrogen one. (Plus/minus something.) At the same distance between atoms, lead will be 200 times heavier than hydrogen. To go for twice as heavy, you need the hydrogen atoms to be packed at over 7 times less distance from each other than lead atoms are.
At a quick googling, the estimated range of densities for metallic hydrogen is anywhere between 0.4g per cubic centimetre (less than lithium) and 4g per cc (4 times as heavy as water), with apparently 0.8 being the most likely candidate for where it turns metal. Compress it any denser and it'll start to fuse. And we're still nowhere near as heavy as we need for that planet.
What throws a further spanner into it, is that our own gas giants _already_ have a core of metallic hydrogen. That' what's in the middle of Jupiter and Saturn. So something 26 times heavier, hmm, must be something else.
The game needed another year or two to bake in the oven, some good professional therapy, and a clear direction.
1. I know you're probably trying to be funny about "some good professional therapy", but they did exactly that for Anarchy Online. After it lost 2/3 of the initial (pitifully low) peak of players, and fast, and their first attempts at fixing it didn't do anything to stop the exodus... they actually hired some external consultants to tell them what's wrong with the game and how to fix it.
Those external guys actually managed to double the number of players, but it was still at 1/10 of the number, say, EQ had. And it went downhill from there again. I guess even pros can only do so much to polish a turd.
Still, just saying, they literally got some professional therapy for their game. 'Cause their own designers weren't up to the task.
2. What amuses me even more, though, is that someone actually gave them a big franchise and a big budget to make... their _third_ failure. Because apparently the turd that was AO, plus one failed and canceled MMO project, counted as being the guys with experience in making MMOs.
They're not even the only ones in that aspect. It seems a disturbingly common thread that some guys fuck up a MMO and then someone gives them a big bag o' money to make another one, 'cause, you know, they now have experience.
It's like asking Michael D. Brown to lead another disaster relief after fucking up Katrina (he was FEMA director back then), on account that he's got the experience now.
I mean... Hello? Doesn't having royally fucked up, and lack of any actual success or of having demonstrated any skill, count for anything?
Heh. Just mark my words. I predict that they'll claim that AOC was an award-winning, critically-acclaimed, genre-defining success. (Why not? They did claim exactly that with AO, when the number of paying subscribers had dived to 12,000.) And someone will give them another big budget, because now they have experience with working on _three_ MMOs.
Maybe it's some publishers that need a good professional therapy, really.
1. Well, the question of exactly what is intelligence, and what role does this or that play, has been the bread and butter of generations of philosophers. Alan Turing took a more "gordian knot" kind of approach: if the human can't tell another human apart from a machine, over a teletype (it was teh high-tech back then;), then the machine is intelligent. That's it. That's all. That's the Turing Test.
He didn't even try to address the question "what is thinking?" or "what is intelligence?", but merely, "can you tell them apart?"
It doesn't say _what_ the judge of that test (the human interacting with both the computer and with the other human) must test. It doesn't say it has to be knowledge, logic, ability to "think", or whatever else. Whatever tips you off to the fact that it's a machine, is fair game.
If most people can say "yep, that one is the machine" accurately, it failed the Turing Test. If it ends up a split where (within the accuracy margin of the given sample) half guessed wrong, congrats, it passed the Turing Test.
2. As an even more extreme example, and to answer the "is it all right to disconnect a machine that passes the Turing test?" question from the summary: I could even devise a Turing Test that games it all, and specifically discriminates against sentient machines.
E.g., I use the question, "Is it ok to shoot a computer?" If anyone answers something like "heh, I sometimes fantasize about shooting mine too", or even "dude, you're crazy if you use guns to take revenge on inanimate objects", they're probably a human. If they answer, "whoa, that's morally wrong! We're sentient too. If you cut us, do we not... erm... leak watercooling fluid?" they're probably a machine and just failed the test.
That hypothetical machine in the example obviously thinks, it's clearly sentient and self-aware, but it failed to convince me that it's a human. It failed the Turing Test, not only in spite of being sentient and having a self-preservation instinct and a moral sense, but _because_ it is all that. So now I can disconnect it since it failed the Turing Test.
It just occured to me that, while people usually think of the Turing test as, basically, "seeing if a machine is smart enough to pass for a human", the test actually doesn't say that. It doesn't put any limit on how to tell it's a machine. Failing by being obviously too smart is a perfectly good way to fail too.
E.g., if I ask them to calculate e to the power of square root of 1234567890987654321 and say that the one who had the correct answer first is the computer, that's a perfectly valid way to judge a Turing test.
E.g., I could ask who won second place the 1914 cricket cup, what was the year and the outcome of the Battle of Frigidus, and how Streptomycin works, and the names of the third track of Britney Spears's first album. Then say that anyone who answered all four correctly _must_ be a bot, because even an Asperger's Syndrome patient would have one or maybe two narrow focuses of interest, not four as disparate as sports, ancient history, microbiology and pop music. It's perfectly ok to call a machine a machine that way too.
Basically a machine can fail a Turing test by being too smart too.
So basically are you _sure_ you'd want a society where being too smart is reason enough to "switch you off"?:P
1. In the Turing test, as it was proposed by Turing, basically there is no way for a human to fail it. The test involves a double blind test, where each user interacts with a human and with a machine. Then if the users can't tell which of them is the human, the machine has "won". If the users correctly voted on which of them is the machine, the machine has "lost." There is no scenario there in which the human didn't pass the test. The human is the control point there, not the one taking the test.
2. But maybe you mean a test with only one entity, where basically you just have to say if that entity is too dumb to be a human.
I wouldn't really pray for that to be reasons for "disconnecting" someone. There was a story on/. a while back, titled, basically, "how I failed the Turing test."
Basically someone's ICQ number had landed on a list of sex bots. For some people that was definitive and refutable proof that he is a bot, and nothing he could say would change that. When he got one or two to ask stuff to see if he's a human, the questions were stuff where really the only correct answer for a normal human (as opposed to, say, a nerd who has to sound like he knows everything) was "I don't know." That "I don't know" was further taken as confirmation that he is a bot after all.
So do you want those people to be the ones who judge whether you live or die?
Furthermore, for most people, gullibility is akin to a deadly sin, and being fooled by a machine is akin to an admission of being terminally gullible. By comparison voting that a living human is probably a machine, counts just as being skeptical, which is actually something positive. So all things being equal, the safe vote for their self-image is that you're a machine. No matter what you say. Are you sure you want to risk life and limb on that kind of a lopsided contest?
The problem is that we're all aliens _somewhere_. The USA isn't that self-contained that only the rest of the world comes to the USA.
I think the USA would have a problem very fast, if its businessmen travelling to Europe would get their laptops confiscated for two weeks, to make sure there is no secret terrorism stuff among that mess of powerpoint slides. (Well, some do cause brain damage. Does that count as terrorism?) Especially when that laptop comes loaded with a copy of some corporation's customer data. (That's how most data losses happened so far. Idiot salesman takes a copy of the database on his laptop, so he can do a snappy presentation for a potential customer. Idiot salesman forgets that laptop on a chair at the airport or in a cab.) I think we'd see a lot of chest thumping and posturing if anyone did that kind of thing to a large enough slice of _your_ citizens.
Also deny them the right to a lawyer? Oooer. I think we'd see some belicose posturing real fast there.
There are a ton of international conventions whose gist is, basically, treat our people right and we'll treat yours right. Because we're _all_ aliens somewhere else. I'm pretty sure that right to a lawyer and whatnot are in there. And maybe we should put the right to some privacy and protection against unreasonable seizures in there too, if it isn't already.
It is telling that you don't want to do any of the RvR stuff since that is the main thing the game is designed around. No wonder you don't like the game.
Well, I wouldn't have a problem, if they had said basically just that: "guys, it's a PvP game, we don't want PvE-ers around these here parts." But that's not what they kept saying in interviews and stuff all over the place. Someone at Mythic or EA obviously decided that they want everyone's money, and kept telling us that yeah, verily, PvP is purely optional, you can play to any level without PvP, the PvE game is perfectly fun and viable on its own.
So, yes, I think it's entirely fair to judge it by how it fares without that PvP stuff. Because that's the promise based on which they got my money.
RP and levels are an integral part of your character development. It's like playing WoW and deciding that you don't want to wear equipment
If it's that integral that you can compare it to WoW gear with a straight face, then it's a PvP game, plain and simple, and the PvE game is a half-arsed kludge on its side. A real viable PvE game would be self-contained enough to not need _any_ RP or renown levels _at_ _all_.
They give you permanent, configurable passive stat boosts and abilities and grant you access to better equipment.
So basically anyone who doesn't PvP is a second class citizen with poorer stats. I'm sorry, but that tells me that their marketing flat out lied to me about the PvE part.
But to get back to that analogy of yours:
It's like playing WoW and deciding that you don't want to wear equipment and it pisses you off you keep getting all this random equipment when you do quests.
No, it's as if some publisher kept telling me that the quests are purely optional, the game is perfectly viable without quests, and verily you have lost nothing if you happen to not like quests. Then discovering that actually they lied, and you'll always be a second class citizen without doing quests. In fact, that the game is so centered around them, that the game has to pretend you did some quests by just being in the same area as someone who did them, to give you a chance at all.
There's a name for promising one thing and not even planing to deliver it: fraud.
Note that I'm not against quests actually, but since your analogy was about those, I had to work with that. The basic idea is more generic: if they promised X and said that Y isn't really needed, then they damn better deliver X and keep Y out of my face entirely. Whatever those X and Y are.
To say it again: what they promised is that the game is also perfectly viable without PvP. I expected a game where the PvE part is indeed able to stand on its own legs, without random RP points as crutches. If it needs that kind of a crutch to be viable, then it tells me that, essentially, they lied to me.
Take WoW for example. You _can_ get to any level or raiding tier without a single "honour" point. The PvE game is really that self self-sufficient and needs no extra crutches.
If "RP and levels are an integral part of your character development" -- in fact, so integral that you can compare it to WoW gear with a straight face -- then it's a PvP game and the PvE game is just a clutch on its side. That's not what their marketing told me. If they had said an honest, "guys, it's a PvP game, we don't need you PvE-ers around these here parts", I could respect that, and they wouldn't have got my money. But that's not what they said.
So I think it's entirely fair to judge the game in the aspect of how viable it is as a purely PvE-only game. And it comes short there. That I then need some PvP points that badly that they're giving me some for free, if nothing else, is a half-arsed crutch, not a PvE game. A viable PvE game wouldn't need those at all.
A. The way rewards are handed out does kind of suck in a way. The bonus for contributing can easily be nullified with a bad or average roll with a slacker just getting a really good roll at the same time. If you do a PQ a few times though you are likely to get a reward it's just a numbers issue. Maybe a higher modifier for contribution is warranted but the system still works.
If I have to do it several times to get the prize, it's not a quest, it's a grind. I have very little interest in that, sadly.
B. So far on the destruction side, I have characters in each area, I haven't really noticed a problem with not being able to finish a PQ if there are enough people around. There not being enough people is directly relateable to WoW when you get a group quest that you can't manage to solo or requires more people than you seem to be able to round up. The closest I have come to not being able to finish a PQ when there was an appropriate number of players was in the Dark Elf area, no tank classes. But we still managed because there were enough healers that we could all stack our heals on whomever was tanking at the moment.
The Destruction side, and especially the Greenskin zones, have the advantage of sheer numbers and a solid mix of damage, tanks and healers. Try it on the Order side, and you might discover that you'll often have 2-3 players total for the PQ, because Order populations really are that low. And in almost each area, there'll be some class that's way unrepresented anyway. E.g., I think I once saw an Archmage in the HE area. That's it. Try doing their PQs with two tanks and a damage dealer, then you'll know what I'm talking about.
A. The marketing for this game was all about the RvR aspects. I think they said they would have PvE but it was a sideline to the RvR.
I had the exact opposite impression. Both Mythic and EA have been in a hurry to tell me all over the place that it's perfectly viable as a PvE game, and, really, PvP is going to be purely optional. That's why they got my money at all.
But, yes, I do get the impression that PvE is just a side-line. The words that come to mind are "bait and switch", but, oh well. I can afford to blow 50 euros on a game.
I am pretty sure most PvE dropped equipment doesn't have a renown requirement. So if you want equipment that doesn't require RvR go check the Auction house in your capital city or farm mobs to your hearts content. Quest equipment might also not require renown, I don't really know because I've never had a problem with not having enough renown.
Sure. Did they tell me in game how to go to an AH or whatever equivalent there is? Because otherwise I'm taking the fact that I start in one corner of the world, and the nearest place to auction being in the opposite corner, as having designed the game on the assumption that it can be played without that. They _did_ put that much thought into it before shoving it out the door, right?;)
C. WoW never had worth while equipment purchaseable from vendors that didn't require end game raiding or PvP. You are playing an MMO, if you want to advance learn to network and take advantage of the fact you can play with others and trade stuff around. Try playing the game as it's designed and not how you wish it was designed before you complain about it not being well done.
1. You'd be surprised. I actually used, say, the one-handed blade from Loch Modan on more than one newbie character, and there are a few others too.
2. Again, if they actually wanted to encourage trading around, well, they could have made it more obvious how to get to an auction house early. Otherwise, I will assume that the game must be designed to be perfectly playable without one. Lack of providing either on their part, doesn't constitute a failure on mine.
Well, maybe before throwing tantrums about people's supposed reading comprehension problems, it would help if it were clear at least to you what you're trying to say. Because
A) "made-up", "Which means your plan won't work", and "you won't be able to level your RR that way" mean it doesn't happen. At all.
B) "won't get you very far", "take forever to level your RR" and "very small amount" mean it does. Slow enough to not bother _you_, maybe, but they do.
If you can argue that a problem is "made-up" while arguing in the same freaking message that, yeah, it does happen but only slowly, then... maybe it would help if you made up your mind first, which of them it is. "Made-up" doesn't mean "it doesn't bother me", you know?
It's the difference between "I won't fuck you up the arse" and "yeah, but I'll do it only very slowly and it'll take for ever." The latter is somewhat less of a consolation when I'm on the receiving side of it.
My problem is that it happens at all. The very fact that some points are given around randomly, no matter at what speed, is what irks me.
The point that it would be faster to do RvR, is moot too, when I just don't give a flying f-word about RvR. It's one passtime I have exactly zero interest in. So for me it won't happen faster that way, because RvR for me won't happen at all. Ever. Under any circumstances. Which leaves me with a trickle of RvR renown points, and it is hard not to notice that it keeps going forward, in spite of not doing anything for it and not even wanting it. Slow, maybe, but it goes forward anyway, without any resemblance to any idea of fair rewards for equal effort.
It's that lack of any semblance of a coherent efforts-vs-rewards or fairness idea, that irks me, not just whether those arbitrarily distributed points go fast or slow.
And not even just by itself, but because that randomness permeates more aspects than just those renown points. When it's not this, it's the broken balance. Or it's the fact that the same tier of PQ in different area, and for the same player level and quality level, the rewards can be as much as twice better. You know, both are a two-hander sword for the same class, both show up as green-quality, and both are for the same episode of PQ, but one does twice the DPS and has better stats. WTF? Didn't anyone take the time to balance what "level 4 green" means across the board, or what? Or if I don't run into that, it's that contribution or effort in a PQ don't coordinate with the rewards anyway. Etc.
Oh, and BTW, the constant handwaving about RvR level 2 being some kind of a cut-off point, is technically false too. I have a character who got to RvR level 5 in about an hour, by just running around doing the PvE newbie quests. So whatever cut-off point there may be, it's definitely a bit higher than 2.
Do yourself a favour and pick one of the many real problems with the game if you still feel a need to criticize it. Scenario exploits, pet problems, ability problems, crafting; there's any number of real problems to discuss without needing to resort to made-up ones.
Its having more (and bigger) problems doesn't make the lack of any coherent balance plan disappear or "made-up". And it's not much of a consolation anyway. It's a bit like saying "well, she may be an alcoholic, but she's schizophrenic too." The latter doesn't excuse the former.
Getting information in the first few weeks regarding the subscriber base sounds rather intelligent to me, though I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on it.
As a general principle, maybe, but in this case I'd worry anyway.
I've seen people before try games they liked lots. It generally ends up a bit of a one game affair. You may not have time to stay in one game 24 hours a day, or even the personality for that, but if it's a great game, you'll do _that_ new game when you play at all. If you can't afford more than 2 hours gaming a day, you spend them in that new game that got your interest.
Whereas here what at least the summary tells me is that... since WAR was launched, people started playing _other_ games more. I'd be worried a lot if I was the publisher of such a game.
The image it paints isn't "well, out hype had also benefited other games." It paints the more likely image that a few people were planning to quit WoW or whatever else, when WAR comes out, and they ended up not actually liking WAR. So now they're too bored to go back to the daily grind on WoW (you'll eventually get bored too, it's just human nature), they can't be arsed to play WAR, and are giving SP games like Oblivion or MMO games like LOTRO another try instead.
If you publish a game and the reaction it inspires in people is, basically, "ya know, maybe it would be more fun to play Oblivion the 6th time instead", you have to ask yourself what went wrong.
Basically there are two ways that the popularity and population can go in those first few weeks. If it goes steadily up, yeah, it's probably premature to say whether it'll stay that way. But if you're losing most players, that won't fix itself. You have to do something. Waiting longer to see the trend will rarely paint any other image than continuing to lose more players. And losing them to a 2 year old single-player game, is reason to worry IMHO.
Well, before I start, "better" or "worse" are a matter of taste, so no telling if mine matches yours. You can't proclaim that a game is, in absolute terms and for everyone, better than another, any more than you could proclaim Pepsi to be better than Coke.
That said, and to start with the punchline: I'm not particularly impressed with WAR. I don't find it "bad" as such either. It even had some good ideas and a nicely different setting, but it obviously wasn't even finished before shoving it out the door, and nobody even tried to give it a good polish first.
Yes, it has some good ideas, like the public quests. But even then it doesn't take long to realize that that mechanic could have been better polished and tuned. Especially in the early stages there are zones where you just won't have the people to finish them with, especially in the ones where it being underfunded resulted in, say, not having a freaking tank in the area or having been blessed with an enemy which two-shots a tank and a lack of healers.
What nailed the PQs collective coffin for me, though, was the realization that you don't even need to actually do them. You can farm the reputation for the rewards by just killing the thrash mobs for stage one, waiting for it to reset, then doing it again. It's not exactly a heroic feeling, it's more like a new take on farming mobs. It gets old fast.
Even if you did go through the extra effort to actually finish it, well, let's just say a lot of times it goes like this:
Rolling for loot... You have ranked 1st for contribution, got a gold medal and 500 bonus for the loot roll... Rolling for loot... You have ranked 10th and get no loot.
Well, gee, it makes me feel so special.
But basically it's not even about loot, it's about "why do I bother?" You could be the guy who stayed on the edge and watched the others fight, and get a prize, while the guy who tanked the boss gets no prize. And the points-based rewards could be done just the same by finding a less popular PQ and grinding the thrash mobs in stage 1. Even if I go through the extra effort, there's not much reason to feel proud about it: someone else got the same rewards with a lot less trouble.
The same applies to other aspects too. E.g., PvP. I create my first char and within 5 seconds I get a message on the screen in big letters that I got PvP renown ("honour" in WoW lingo) rank 2. At that point I didn't even know where I am and what am I doing, so I'm like, "Huh? What did I _do_? Did I step in a dwarf or something?"
What happened is that if someone captures an objective in the PvP sub-zone of a bigger map, everyone on the map gets the PvP points just the same.
Again, then why would I bother with PvP? The best way to get PvP renown is to simply park your character behind an inn or something in the PvE zone and go AFK. In fact, leave it there while you see a movie or over night. Eventually someone will go capture the flag or something, and you'll get the points just as well.
It's just hard to take a reward seriously when it can be obtained by just randomly being logged in at the right time, even when AFK.
I'll take a wild guess and say that the root of the problem is a schizophrenic design, which can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a PvP game or PvE too. If you're serious about equally suitable for PvE-only players, then let me freaking buy _some_ stuff without PvP points. (I've found no vendors where you can even get a basic sword without the equivalent of "honour". And, oh, they even have the equivalent of talents bought with PvP renown.) If it's only for PvP-ers, then say that already and let the rest of us know we don't have to bother. But the "solution" of giving PvP points to everyone, whether they PvP or not, is neither here not there. It cheapens the whole thing for both.
For PvP, it becomes a meaningless reward that everyone else gets just as well. Why would you bother? What are your bragging rights, if everyone else runs around in the same PvP gear and has th
Yet if you replace the term $ with a stock unit and suddenly it should be illegal?
1. How about, because if you replace it with _anything_ else, it is already illegal? It's called counterfeiting.
Let's give up on the car example, and use something where similarly the price is mostly a function of how much the market believes it's worth. Like, say, a Rolex. I'm the broker, dad has a Rolex, Uncle Fester wants to buy a Rolex. So now we have, as a direct equivalent of how the system works now:
A. Normal shorting: I swipe Dad's Rolex and replace it with a Chinese counterfeit one worth pennies, instead of an IOU. Nobody will know the difference, hopefully. I sell the real Rolex to Uncle Fester. (On the hope that later I'll be able to buy another Rolex cheaper and replace the fake one with it.)
B. Naked shorting: I don't bother with that, I just sell the counterfeit Rolex to Uncle Fester. (On the hope that later I'll be able to buy another Rolex cheaper and replace the fake one with it.)
The problem is: in both cases now there are two Rolex watches out there, when the real company sold only one. It not only devalues the status symbol for those who bought one, it also messes up the company's market.
And it's _already_ illegal. Why _wouldn't_ it also be illegal when the counterfeit goods are shares? Yes, we tollerate that for money, based on a complicated theory of why that multiplication effect is actually desirable and why we think we can control it. But that doesn't automatically mean you can clone everything else with impunity.
Do you see any aspects of the watch analogy that don't apply to shares? Technically speaking, even the dillution of the brand is exactly like that. A company issues a certain "brand" of stock. That's its trademark in the stock market, so to speak. By flooding the (stock) market with clones, I fuck up the supply side and dillute their brand too.
Except in this case (i) it can fuck a company up even worse than counterfeit goods, and (ii) there isn't even a way to tell which goods are counterfeit and which aren't.
2. And we're not just talking about creating more shares (the trader could just issue its own stock there, if they wanted to), but targeting a very specific company and deflating its shares. For both itself, and its investors. It's predatory in nature.
As another analogy: stock being sorta a different kind of IOU (you can vote to break up the company and take your share of the assets, for example), issuing extra stock in someone's name is really like issuing an IOU in their name... without even asking that first. If I'm the broker and you're the company, it's like me signing IOUs in your name. Which again, would be illegal if anyone did it with anything else than stocks. If I went and sold half the ownership of your house without actually owning it, you wouldn't argue that it should be legal, you'd want me thrown in jail. So why _should_ it be legal with stock?
3. As I was saying, the problem isn't that IOUs exist, but that they're indistinguishable from the real shares. (Except to the DTCC, but they're not telling.) In the bank example, you can tell which is the IOU and which is the money. In the shares example, you can't.
If I had an IOU for money signed by Refco, you'd know it it's worthless since they went bankrupt. If you had an IOU (marked as just an IOU) for Sedona shares, you'd know you didn't actually get the shares yet, and again they're bankrupt so you probably never will get them. You wouldn't show up at a shareholder meeting to vote with that IOU, for example, nor try to sell it back to Sedona if it ever bought it's stock back. But when they're indistinguishable, exactly that kind of thing can and does happen. In reality, if you have an IOU for Sedona shares issued by Refco, it looks like the genuine thing and entitles you to everything that a real stock does. A rogue trader essentially issued stock in Sedona's name, with all the rights that that entitles one to. And that is just wrong.
1. Unfortunately, "critically acclaimed" doesn't really mean much. It means that at least one reviewer wrote a glowing review, whether because he really bends over that easily for the publisher's ads and freebies, or because he liked the idea lots after playing for 5 minutes on God mode.
Anarchy Online was "critically acclaimed" and it was launched as an unplayable mess of bugs, with bad balance. It lost players hand over fist _fast_ and only stabilized after being turned into a freebie ad-supported game, and even then at a _pitiful_ number of subscribers. So not that many players liked it either.
Aiken's Artefact was "critically acclaimed" and IIRC it sold a pitiful 800 copies in the beginning. (Not sure how many more were bundled later in "top X games" bundles.)
Looking Glass's games were "critically acclaimed" and had such a rabid following that, arguably, it was the "OMG, Eidos killed Looking Glass to keep funding Daikatana" that broke the camel's back and triggered the devastating backlash against what would have otherwise have been merely a mediocre game with outdated graphics. But, funnily enough, Looking Glass had more rabid fanboys, than it had paying customers. Their last couple of games (e.g., the Terra Nova experiment) sold pitifully few copies, and even other publishers (e.g., Microsoft) no longer wanted to touch them with a ten foot polearm. Reviewers and fanboys ranted and raved about how great and innovative the Looking Glass games are, but people didn't actually buy those games.
So aiming for "critically acclaimed" instead of sales, is a bit like aiming to be the ugly girl with a great personality.
Now I'm not saying that DX1 was "bad", so hold yer horses. But if it didn't sell great, it didn't sell great, and that's that. I can see why a publisher or developper would try to change a few bits and see if it does better.
2. And part of its problem was that it wasn't really anything anyone could put their finger upon. It was barely even an FPS, but it required FPS skills to get out of a firefight alive. It wasn't a forced stealth game, but mostly you had to anyway... except when it wouldn't work and you'd be back to needing FPS skills again. It was barely even a CRPG, but it tried to tell CRPG fans that it was one. Then they'd need FPS skills or have to deal with forced stealth, instead of the usual concentrating on the semi-interactive storyline while letting the computer roll the targeting dice. Etc.
Now I'm not saying that _only_ FPS skills worked, but... let's put it like this: from all that bewildering array of possibilities for solving any problem, there'd be at least one point in the game where _your_ favourite approach just didn't work and you had to do something else. For each category of players, a different one.
Basically instead of catering to the union of FPS, stealth and RPG fans, it really catered to an intersection of the three sets. You had to be the kind of guy who enjoys all three, to go through the whole game and like it. Because otherwise sooner or later a section of the game would come up which forced you to do the one you dislike.
Now if you were indeed at least semi-comfortable with all 3, I'm not going to say you shouldn't like it. In fact, I'm happy for you. But, well, that's one possibility as to why it had only mediocre sales. Because it really catered to a minority.
And from that point of view, again I can see why a publisher would try to enlarge that target market segment.
The more worrysome problem there, though, is that the USA system (and probably a few others) works on IOUs that are indistinguishable from real shares even to those who own them. In your car analogy, essentially you'd sell the car, but when mom looks in her garrage, she still sees the car there.
But analogies aren't even necessary, let's look at the real thing. Let's say we have the following actors: Mr Investor who owns 1000 shares of IBM, Mr Broker who does the shorting, and Aunt Emma who's gotten into her head to invest her savings into IBM stock. Now the initial stages of shorting look like this:
1. Normal shorting.
Mr Broker borrows the 1000 shares from Mr Investor, and replaces them with IOUs. Then he sells the 1000 shares to Aunt Emma.
Hopefully temporary outcome: Mr Investor now owns 1000 IOUs for IBM shares, Aunt Emma owns 1000 IBM shares.
2. Naked shorting.
Mr Broker doesn't bother even locating Mr Investor, and just sells Aunt Emma some 1000 IOUs.
Hopefully temporary outcome: Aunt Emma now owns 1000 IOUs for IBM shares, Mr Investor still owns his 1000 IBM shares.
The problem, the way I understand it, is that in both cases, the IOUs are indistinguishable from the real thing by anyone outside the DTCC. (The big hub where those transactions take place.) In both cases, both Aunt Emma and Mr Investor can look at their portfolio at any given time, and they _both_ will see that they own 1000 IBM shares. Genuine shares, not IOUs.
In both cases, 1000 shares just became 2000 shares. And the effect can further cascade, as Aunt Emma's shares can be loaned by somebody else, creating another 1000 IOUs that are indistinguishable from real shares. And so on. At some point 10 different people can show up and demand vote with their 1000 shares each, but they're all the same 1000 shares, duplicated in that process. And someone can look and see the extra shares around artifficially inflating the supply on the stock market.
Basically to go back to your analogy, after all, temporarily Mom _and_ this guy own the same car as if it were two different cars. And the car can be further duplicated down the line like that, until the whole bloody neighbourhood owns a car each... and they're all the same car: mom's 2003 Saab.
I wouldn't have a problem with it, if the IOUs were clearly marked as IOUs, and not as real shares. Then either Aunt Emma or Mr Investor can look at their portfolio and go, "ah, I'm still owed 1000 shares by that guy." But they don't. They both see that they have 1000 shares.
I think understand the reasoning behind hiding those details. After all, Aunt Emma paid for her shares, might as well hide the details, delays and imperfections in the system, and just pretend that she owns the shares already. The actual transfer will happen in the background, all will balance out, and she doesn't need to worry her head with all that. Ain't life grand, when the system just makes things work in the background, and you don't even have to know when the actual transfer happened or how?
Well, yes, except when it fails. The more obvious way is when you still have the IOUs, but the person owing them to you just went out of business. Refco's fallout apparently left hideous numbers of IOUs out on the market, and nobody except the DTCC can tell which are real shares and which are IOUs. As long as the two are exactly the same for everyone else, it doesn't even matter if it was normal shorting (and Mr Investor is left holding the IOUs thinking they're real shares) or naked shorting (Aunt Emma is.) In both cases, some duplicate shares are left on the market, and are screwing not only the companies, but also the individual investors. But then there's obviously also the situation where the system is gamed and IOUs are just left around to accumulate, at either end, pretending they're real shares.
I just can't see how or why that kind of a system is even legal.
Except that's a highly subjective and inaccurate thing, as I was saying about moderation and reputation. My bullshit detector says that anything contradicting my existing bias is bullshit, and anything which confirms that bias must be true.
E.g., as a purely random and made-up example, an argument about socialized healthcare will register as "bullshit to justify stealing _my_ money" for the stereotypical die-hard right-winger, and as "damn right" for the stereotypical left-winger. An argument to cut down on healthcare and welfare and give more money to the rich, will be seen exactly the other way around.
E.g., "we're to blame 100% for the climate change and a bunch of people should die or live like in the middle ages to protect the planet" will register as "damn right" through the stereotypical carbon-cultist's "bullshit detector", and as "damn self-hating hippies are selling us their bullshit doomsday scenario again" by the stereotypical GW denialist. Conversely, an opinion column saying basically, "no, it's not happening and NASA has been massaging the raw data to create the impression of an accelerated climate change", will register as the exact opposite for both.
And yes, I'm talking extremes of either view here, for example sake.
Is either right or wrong about it? In effect they're both using their existing biases as "bullshit detector". It's not as much detecting bullshit as self-reinforcement. A news source or piece of news seems reliable, if it tells you or me what we want to hear.
And what do you do for news that don't even fit that? Stuff like that Steve Jobs had a heart attack, which is what we're talking about here, doesn't easily fit any ideology. (Except maybe for a couple of extreme pro- or anti-Apple fanboys.) It's not obvious what kind of a bullshit detector could call that BS. It's stuff that _could_ happen. People die of heart attacks every day.
Well, the problem with citizen journalism is that, pretty much by definition, you don't know who's who. It could be
- a concerned citizen who's done his research, but equally it could be
- a traditional journalist trying to get more street cred to his newspaper views (see the story about that guy editing Wikipedia about naked shorting,)
- an idiot talking out the arse,
- a zealot on some holy crusade, and who already found his "Truth" and all that remains is to spread the word to the ignorant masses. And for whom no lies, fallacies, FUD, disinformation or hyperboles are too low to be used in that holy goal. (And not just lonely nerds. Whole think-tanks exist who make propaganda their only mission.)
- a paranoid schizophrenic who takes his own imagination for reality (and I mean paranoid schizophrenia as in, the medical meaning: the kind that comes with realistic delusions),
- a shill (PR disguised as news, astroturfing and pseudo-word-of-mouth buzz-building are still popular devices),
- someone trying to manipulate another company's stock (own before selling some, or the stock of someone he wants to buy stock in),
- a joker who isn't funny enough to be clear that he's joking (just look on Snopes for some fine examples of joke news which then got taken seriously by too many people. Or I've seen at least one serious article, which linked to a The Onion story as source,)
Etc, etc, etc.
So going, essentially, "yeah, well, but that was one of the _other_ guys, trust us not him" is handwaving, as long as you can't tell who's who. For the outside guy, they all look the same. And they all claim they're the genuine article, and some _others_ are the ones you shouldn't trust.
Even reputation, people linking to it, posts confirming it, etc, are meaningless. For a start, we're in the golden age of sockpuppets. Also, things which are blatantly false for anyone with even a modicum of education, routinely get modded up "Informative" even on Slashdot, and conversely textbook quotes routinely get modded down. Or look at how "pundits" like Dvorak make a living and are read by a ton of people as great IT information, even though he's the same guy who had a whole article along the lines of, "my idle process in windows is using up 99% of the CPU cycles! That's why my windows is sluggish!"
Journalism reputation (online or old press, equally) is more of a question of saying the things a given crowd wants to hear, than anything even vaguely resembling truth value or quality. Or a matter of sounding like some knowledgeable guy giving a free lecture, even if you don't actually know jack shit about the topic. Again, see half those IT "pundits", but also a good number of posts right here on Slashdot.
Even credentials are routinely faked (see, 14 year old kids posing as some Ph.D.) or bought. Either from some diploma mill, or just finding someone with a Ph.D. title to sign your PR piece. Corporate PR uses the latter kind quite extensively. There'll always be someone who doesn't have much of a good name to lose, and will take your 30 silvers to give science the kiss of death. Even with tongue, if you pay extra.
So who _do_ you trust in a medium where for each 1 genuine citizen journalist, there are 99 fakes?
1. Well, AFAIK a simple change worked perfectly for other countries, and in fact it's how the stock market has always worked in most places that aren't the USA. It's similar to what in computer programming you'd call "distributed transactions" or the ACID principle: the swap between shares and money happens simultaneously, and either both succeed or both fail.
In non-nerd terms: you don't get the money until you actually deliver the shares.
It's mostly a USA problem that you can sell IOUs. And the fallout is exactly the same that those of us programming databases already knew would happen when a non-transacted program goes wrong: Refco alone apparently left ridiculous ammounts of fake shares in the economy.
With the change of the swap being simultaneous, pretty much that disappears: you don't actually get the money for 1000 Sedona shares until you can actually deliver 1000 Sedona shares, and the buyer doesn't own an extra 1000 shares in the meantime. You can game on the delay, but in the end any transaction you can't deliver can be basically rolled back, leaving the economy to where it was before. Grandma gets her money back, sorry, couldn't buy Sedona stock after all. The broker didn't make any money in the end. Sedona doesn't end up with ten times more shares on the market than it issued.
Now I'm not saying it can't be gamed, but you can't sell what you don't have. You can promise to sell what you don't have, but at no point does it become something that looks like genuine extra shares.
2. Most of the world's economy works perfectly well that way.
It never ceases to amaze me the way the USA insists that any of their quirks are grrreat (and according to some, even _vital_) for a working system, and eliminating them would spell doom and gloom for everyone. Especially when perfectly good examples exist of countries and economies which work perfectly well without those quirks.
And yes, people still buy stock, even when it's impossible for it to be counterfeit. (Since your argument seems to be that without naked shorting you wouldn't buy stock for fear of it being overvalued.) I don't know about you, but I'd be _more_ inclined to buy stock in the next Sedona, if I know that there can't be a Refco flooding the market with FTDs and devaluing my portfolio to penny-stock.
3. It loks to me like shorting generally, whether legitimate or fraudulent ("naked",) does _nothing_ to prevent stock becoming overvalued, or even an outright bubble. You don't short stocks when they're _rising_, so it will do nothing whatsoever to prevent their becoming overvalued. It just accelerates the fall once they go a bit over the top. So instead of preventing a bubble, it just makes the crash harder at the end of it.
In fact, from where I stand, it looks to me like it might even encourage a bubble. Traders can essentially ride a company both ways, and make money from both its rise _and_ its fall. There is very little to discourage helping it become way over-valued, when it just means you'll make more money on its way down too.
What that means for the private investor isn't that someone is helpful and keeps you from buying overvalued stock which may fall later. It means that someone else is encouraging stocks to become overvalued in the first place and then helping _your_ shares fall faster when they fall, and making some money out of it. Essentially that mechanism means he can make some money by making you lose more. Exactly why _that_ would be more incentive to invest, is beyond me.
Yet at least once exactly that happened: somebody called a trader called Refco and told him to "mercilessly short Sedona". It's apparently on tape too.
It's hard to take an argument that no trader would do it, when at least one cheerfully did.
Additionally, the ones in the best position to do either kind of shorting _are_ the Brokers/Dealers. In fact, the only ones who can. So maybe they'd laugh if _you_ called and asked them to break the law for you (though, again, at least Refco didn't), but there's nothing to say they wouldn't engineer a company's death spiral for their own monetary gain.
There's one big sci-fi MMO you're missing out and that's EVE Online, though it differs significantly from the run-of-the-mill MMOs for much, much more than simply being set in a sci-fi universe and doesn't seem to be what you're looking for.
Duly noted and thanks for the correction. Still, you're correct, I was meaning the more traditional kind of MMO, not the space sim kind.
Actually, there are quite a few of us praying for a good SF MMO. I don't even care much about franchise, personally, just give me something battery-, clip- or belt-fed already. That market segment is way under-represented. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against high fantasy setups either, but that market segment is already catered for.
Arguably, excessively catered for. I mean, if you look at the current MMO player base, about 99% is fantasy, and about 1% is SF or modern day. If you look at TV viewer estimates, the numbers are almost reversed. Unless someone can argue convincingly that the same people who like SF more on TV, somehow prefer high fantasy in a game, there must be a _lot_ of untapped potential market.
And if you think about it, it's not even that much competition they have in that segment. The problem of the SF genre so far was that it was half-arsely done. E.g., AO was launched as a festering pile of shit (read the Something Awful reviews, and know that they barely scratch the surface of how bad it was.) E.g., SWG had exactly one saving grace: its character development system. But otherwise an incompetent designer and an incompetent publisher ran it into the ground, and managed to turn the biggest franchise in history into a niche. I'd say "etc" at this point, but was there _anything_ else worth talking about in the SF MMO genre? I'm drawing blanks.
(Yes, there is COH/COV, and fun game it is, but it's IMHO not really SF. It's its own genre.)
Also about most people playing one game at a time, that is true, but that's only half the equation. The other half is that most people don't stay in a game for ever. Last I've seen a number, it was 6 months average for a MMO player. Then he leaves. (Of course, averages are averages. Some people barely play for a month, some hang around for 3 years, but the average is around 6 months.) You eventually have seen it all, eventually you get bored of doing the same thing repeatedly as endgame, and bugger off.
Before someone jumps in to defend it: I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's just that (A) nobody can afford to make near-infinite content, so you keep doing new things for ever, and (B) people eventually get bored of doing the same thing every day. You'd get bored even of chocolate cake if that was all you ate, day after day.
Basically the behemoth that is WoW is shedding bored players all the time, by the millions, and getting new players all the time. Same as any other MMO. And it also gets a big chunk of its old players back after a while, because they didn't find another game to their liking.
Someone could make a damn good living by just offering all the ex-WoW-ers a new home. Of course, then it would have to not suck. That's where most have failed so far.
The traditional model of doing a half-arsed effort and maybe patching it (to be even worse) later, is all but dead. WoW may not have been that original, but it took the time to polish the whole thing far beyond what anyone else had tried. (If they even tried at all, that is.) It set a new standard. Going back to a traditional half-arsed, launched-unfinished MMO, is like going from colour TV back to monochrome for a lot of us.
So making that net that catches those falling off WoW, might take a lot more money and talent than it sounds. And apparently more than your average publisher feels like risking.
But, still, at least theoretically it's possible. The "???" between "1. buy some license" and "3. profit!!!" is simply: "make a polished game, and don't shove it out the door a year too early." And I'd expect that eventually it will happen. Maybe it'll be Stargate or maybe something else, but eventually it will happen.
The original claim, that I was answering to, was that somehow the top level guys are the only ones catered for, and the mid-game is left to be boring. That's what I was originally answering to.
And I'm saying that that's flat out not true. That
1. there is less content for you to see there. Look at the surface of those endgame dungeons, or hours to see each once, or whatever metric you wish to use. There is less of it. Yes, you can do it more than once, but then you could also do the Deadmines more than once if you want to. Just doing it more than once doesn't make it more content.
2. _if_ you didn't like whatever there was to do at mid level, I still don't think many people will get extatic about the same things at the end. You still do the same basic things, you know?
3. yes, most people _do_ eventually get bored of that repetition. It's not even as much a personal opinion. Last time I've seen a statistic, it said that the average player stays in a game for about 6 months. (Some more, some less, but that's how averages work.) That's a lot of bang per buck, no doubt, but chances are you _will_ eventually get bored of doing the same things again.
I am _not_ telling you whether you should like it or not, and I'm not telling you how to play the game.
Do you have any problem with those 3 points? Well, then say so. But being subjected to some lame armchair shrink gig, based on someone's inventing outright falsehoods about me, is... lame.
That said:
Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean a lot of other people can't enjoy it. So why don't you play games that are fun for you and stop crying about games you don't find fun (after you have played them for a long time).
I never said that WoW wasn't fun. In fact, I'm currently going through the low levels again with a group of 2 other friends who've made matching alts just for that. I don't find the end grind fun, but then I'm not doing it any more anyway. Do you see any basic problem with that?
It's outright silly to be fed the "stop crying about games you don't find fun (after you have played them for a long time)" line, when, you know, usually that's _my_ line. Trust me, I _know_ that any game who kept me busy for more than 10 hours (the average length nowadays of an offline game costing the same), must have had _some_ good points. Usually I come across as some kind of Blizzard fanboy, so it's kinda funny to simultaneously come across as that which I constantly criticize.
I just don't see how can anyone claim that only the level 70's are catered for, and that everyone else is some kind of second class citizen. You know, given hat there is less content for the former than for the latter. That's the claim I was answering to. Again, I'm certainly not telling you that you shouldn't like it. And I'm not claiming that the whole game is bad.
Basically: Address what I've actually said, not what you imagine, please. God knows I probably say enough actual dumb stuff to pick on as it is. No need to build a strawman about how you imagine me to be:P
Fact is, many people like the end game because that is where the best loot is and where everyone is grouping.
Well, that's funny, 'cause our armchair-shrink friend was claiming it's _not_ for the loot, and that somehow I have some personality deffect that makes me fixate on loot. Maybe you can have a vote and decide if my mental problem is being for or against phat loot? It's kinda impossible to be both;)
They don't care that they are clicking the same buttons, they care about spending time with their guild/friends. You don't see any value in that...that's fine, but there are a lot of people that do. And a lot that goes in to WoW is going to be catering to those types of people. Expansion packs are more for your type where you can have new content that you don't nee
It's only pointless to you because it does not feed your particular ego-centric metric. You've done nothing but to reinforce my assumptions in my OP that you only value one vector (relative effectiveness as an individual in an endgame group). I did not speak to your demographic as that was not hinted at. You've decided that I'm attacking you outright, as opposed to asking you to try to be more constructive in your criticisms than a 12 year old is.
Dude, I've said _nothing_ about effectiveness of an individual or anything. I keep saying that what bores me is doing the same content again. But that somehow reinforces your belief to the contrary. _Can_ you read, or wtf?
And after months, you decide the game is designed badly and it's NOT fun. It's easy to discover why, as it's all about how you enjoy things. Take a chill pill, and go help yourself to a shrink.
Again, _can_ you read? I've said _nowhere_ that the game is badly designed.
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Actually, I don't think that metallic hydrogen is twice as dense as solid lead.
If you look at most metals, the higher the atomic weight, the higher the density of the solid. Depleted uranium is heavy, while Aluminium is lightweight, and Lithium is half the density of water, for example. So for hydrogen, metallic or not, to be denser than lead, you need it to be packed tighter than, I think, is physically possible.
At some quick maths, a hydrogen atom is 1, lead is 207-208 (82 protons and a load of neutrons.) I know that some mass is actually in the binding energy between those, but for some quick and very approximative maths let's say a lead atom is 200 times heavier than a hydrogen one. (Plus/minus something.) At the same distance between atoms, lead will be 200 times heavier than hydrogen. To go for twice as heavy, you need the hydrogen atoms to be packed at over 7 times less distance from each other than lead atoms are.
At a quick googling, the estimated range of densities for metallic hydrogen is anywhere between 0.4g per cubic centimetre (less than lithium) and 4g per cc (4 times as heavy as water), with apparently 0.8 being the most likely candidate for where it turns metal. Compress it any denser and it'll start to fuse. And we're still nowhere near as heavy as we need for that planet.
What throws a further spanner into it, is that our own gas giants _already_ have a core of metallic hydrogen. That' what's in the middle of Jupiter and Saturn. So something 26 times heavier, hmm, must be something else.
1. I know you're probably trying to be funny about "some good professional therapy", but they did exactly that for Anarchy Online. After it lost 2/3 of the initial (pitifully low) peak of players, and fast, and their first attempts at fixing it didn't do anything to stop the exodus... they actually hired some external consultants to tell them what's wrong with the game and how to fix it.
Those external guys actually managed to double the number of players, but it was still at 1/10 of the number, say, EQ had. And it went downhill from there again. I guess even pros can only do so much to polish a turd.
Still, just saying, they literally got some professional therapy for their game. 'Cause their own designers weren't up to the task.
2. What amuses me even more, though, is that someone actually gave them a big franchise and a big budget to make... their _third_ failure. Because apparently the turd that was AO, plus one failed and canceled MMO project, counted as being the guys with experience in making MMOs.
They're not even the only ones in that aspect. It seems a disturbingly common thread that some guys fuck up a MMO and then someone gives them a big bag o' money to make another one, 'cause, you know, they now have experience.
It's like asking Michael D. Brown to lead another disaster relief after fucking up Katrina (he was FEMA director back then), on account that he's got the experience now.
I mean... Hello? Doesn't having royally fucked up, and lack of any actual success or of having demonstrated any skill, count for anything?
Heh. Just mark my words. I predict that they'll claim that AOC was an award-winning, critically-acclaimed, genre-defining success. (Why not? They did claim exactly that with AO, when the number of paying subscribers had dived to 12,000.) And someone will give them another big budget, because now they have experience with working on _three_ MMOs.
Maybe it's some publishers that need a good professional therapy, really.
1. Well, the question of exactly what is intelligence, and what role does this or that play, has been the bread and butter of generations of philosophers. Alan Turing took a more "gordian knot" kind of approach: if the human can't tell another human apart from a machine, over a teletype (it was teh high-tech back then;), then the machine is intelligent. That's it. That's all. That's the Turing Test.
He didn't even try to address the question "what is thinking?" or "what is intelligence?", but merely, "can you tell them apart?"
It doesn't say _what_ the judge of that test (the human interacting with both the computer and with the other human) must test. It doesn't say it has to be knowledge, logic, ability to "think", or whatever else. Whatever tips you off to the fact that it's a machine, is fair game.
If most people can say "yep, that one is the machine" accurately, it failed the Turing Test. If it ends up a split where (within the accuracy margin of the given sample) half guessed wrong, congrats, it passed the Turing Test.
2. As an even more extreme example, and to answer the "is it all right to disconnect a machine that passes the Turing test?" question from the summary: I could even devise a Turing Test that games it all, and specifically discriminates against sentient machines.
E.g., I use the question, "Is it ok to shoot a computer?" If anyone answers something like "heh, I sometimes fantasize about shooting mine too", or even "dude, you're crazy if you use guns to take revenge on inanimate objects", they're probably a human. If they answer, "whoa, that's morally wrong! We're sentient too. If you cut us, do we not... erm... leak watercooling fluid?" they're probably a machine and just failed the test.
That hypothetical machine in the example obviously thinks, it's clearly sentient and self-aware, but it failed to convince me that it's a human. It failed the Turing Test, not only in spite of being sentient and having a self-preservation instinct and a moral sense, but _because_ it is all that. So now I can disconnect it since it failed the Turing Test.
Wrap your mind around that paradox ;)
It just occured to me that, while people usually think of the Turing test as, basically, "seeing if a machine is smart enough to pass for a human", the test actually doesn't say that. It doesn't put any limit on how to tell it's a machine. Failing by being obviously too smart is a perfectly good way to fail too.
E.g., if I ask them to calculate e to the power of square root of 1234567890987654321 and say that the one who had the correct answer first is the computer, that's a perfectly valid way to judge a Turing test.
E.g., I could ask who won second place the 1914 cricket cup, what was the year and the outcome of the Battle of Frigidus, and how Streptomycin works, and the names of the third track of Britney Spears's first album. Then say that anyone who answered all four correctly _must_ be a bot, because even an Asperger's Syndrome patient would have one or maybe two narrow focuses of interest, not four as disparate as sports, ancient history, microbiology and pop music. It's perfectly ok to call a machine a machine that way too.
Basically a machine can fail a Turing test by being too smart too.
So basically are you _sure_ you'd want a society where being too smart is reason enough to "switch you off"? :P
1. In the Turing test, as it was proposed by Turing, basically there is no way for a human to fail it. The test involves a double blind test, where each user interacts with a human and with a machine. Then if the users can't tell which of them is the human, the machine has "won". If the users correctly voted on which of them is the machine, the machine has "lost." There is no scenario there in which the human didn't pass the test. The human is the control point there, not the one taking the test.
2. But maybe you mean a test with only one entity, where basically you just have to say if that entity is too dumb to be a human.
I wouldn't really pray for that to be reasons for "disconnecting" someone. There was a story on /. a while back, titled, basically, "how I failed the Turing test."
Basically someone's ICQ number had landed on a list of sex bots. For some people that was definitive and refutable proof that he is a bot, and nothing he could say would change that. When he got one or two to ask stuff to see if he's a human, the questions were stuff where really the only correct answer for a normal human (as opposed to, say, a nerd who has to sound like he knows everything) was "I don't know." That "I don't know" was further taken as confirmation that he is a bot after all.
So do you want those people to be the ones who judge whether you live or die?
Furthermore, for most people, gullibility is akin to a deadly sin, and being fooled by a machine is akin to an admission of being terminally gullible. By comparison voting that a living human is probably a machine, counts just as being skeptical, which is actually something positive. So all things being equal, the safe vote for their self-image is that you're a machine. No matter what you say. Are you sure you want to risk life and limb on that kind of a lopsided contest?
The problem is that we're all aliens _somewhere_. The USA isn't that self-contained that only the rest of the world comes to the USA.
I think the USA would have a problem very fast, if its businessmen travelling to Europe would get their laptops confiscated for two weeks, to make sure there is no secret terrorism stuff among that mess of powerpoint slides. (Well, some do cause brain damage. Does that count as terrorism?) Especially when that laptop comes loaded with a copy of some corporation's customer data. (That's how most data losses happened so far. Idiot salesman takes a copy of the database on his laptop, so he can do a snappy presentation for a potential customer. Idiot salesman forgets that laptop on a chair at the airport or in a cab.) I think we'd see a lot of chest thumping and posturing if anyone did that kind of thing to a large enough slice of _your_ citizens.
Also deny them the right to a lawyer? Oooer. I think we'd see some belicose posturing real fast there.
There are a ton of international conventions whose gist is, basically, treat our people right and we'll treat yours right. Because we're _all_ aliens somewhere else. I'm pretty sure that right to a lawyer and whatnot are in there. And maybe we should put the right to some privacy and protection against unreasonable seizures in there too, if it isn't already.
Well, I wouldn't have a problem, if they had said basically just that: "guys, it's a PvP game, we don't want PvE-ers around these here parts." But that's not what they kept saying in interviews and stuff all over the place. Someone at Mythic or EA obviously decided that they want everyone's money, and kept telling us that yeah, verily, PvP is purely optional, you can play to any level without PvP, the PvE game is perfectly fun and viable on its own.
So, yes, I think it's entirely fair to judge it by how it fares without that PvP stuff. Because that's the promise based on which they got my money.
If it's that integral that you can compare it to WoW gear with a straight face, then it's a PvP game, plain and simple, and the PvE game is a half-arsed kludge on its side. A real viable PvE game would be self-contained enough to not need _any_ RP or renown levels _at_ _all_.
So basically anyone who doesn't PvP is a second class citizen with poorer stats. I'm sorry, but that tells me that their marketing flat out lied to me about the PvE part.
But to get back to that analogy of yours:
No, it's as if some publisher kept telling me that the quests are purely optional, the game is perfectly viable without quests, and verily you have lost nothing if you happen to not like quests. Then discovering that actually they lied, and you'll always be a second class citizen without doing quests. In fact, that the game is so centered around them, that the game has to pretend you did some quests by just being in the same area as someone who did them, to give you a chance at all.
There's a name for promising one thing and not even planing to deliver it: fraud.
Note that I'm not against quests actually, but since your analogy was about those, I had to work with that. The basic idea is more generic: if they promised X and said that Y isn't really needed, then they damn better deliver X and keep Y out of my face entirely. Whatever those X and Y are.
To say it again: what they promised is that the game is also perfectly viable without PvP. I expected a game where the PvE part is indeed able to stand on its own legs, without random RP points as crutches. If it needs that kind of a crutch to be viable, then it tells me that, essentially, they lied to me.
Take WoW for example. You _can_ get to any level or raiding tier without a single "honour" point. The PvE game is really that self self-sufficient and needs no extra crutches.
If "RP and levels are an integral part of your character development" -- in fact, so integral that you can compare it to WoW gear with a straight face -- then it's a PvP game and the PvE game is just a clutch on its side. That's not what their marketing told me. If they had said an honest, "guys, it's a PvP game, we don't need you PvE-ers around these here parts", I could respect that, and they wouldn't have got my money. But that's not what they said.
So I think it's entirely fair to judge the game in the aspect of how viable it is as a purely PvE-only game. And it comes short there. That I then need some PvP points that badly that they're giving me some for free, if nothing else, is a half-arsed crutch, not a PvE game. A viable PvE game wouldn't need those at all.
If I have to do it several times to get the prize, it's not a quest, it's a grind. I have very little interest in that, sadly.
The Destruction side, and especially the Greenskin zones, have the advantage of sheer numbers and a solid mix of damage, tanks and healers. Try it on the Order side, and you might discover that you'll often have 2-3 players total for the PQ, because Order populations really are that low. And in almost each area, there'll be some class that's way unrepresented anyway. E.g., I think I once saw an Archmage in the HE area. That's it. Try doing their PQs with two tanks and a damage dealer, then you'll know what I'm talking about.
I had the exact opposite impression. Both Mythic and EA have been in a hurry to tell me all over the place that it's perfectly viable as a PvE game, and, really, PvP is going to be purely optional. That's why they got my money at all.
But, yes, I do get the impression that PvE is just a side-line. The words that come to mind are "bait and switch", but, oh well. I can afford to blow 50 euros on a game.
Sure. Did they tell me in game how to go to an AH or whatever equivalent there is? Because otherwise I'm taking the fact that I start in one corner of the world, and the nearest place to auction being in the opposite corner, as having designed the game on the assumption that it can be played without that. They _did_ put that much thought into it before shoving it out the door, right? ;)
1. You'd be surprised. I actually used, say, the one-handed blade from Loch Modan on more than one newbie character, and there are a few others too.
2. Again, if they actually wanted to encourage trading around, well, they could have made it more obvious how to get to an auction house early. Otherwise, I will assume that the game must be designed to be perfectly playable without one. Lack of providing either on their part, doesn't constitute a failure on mine.
Again, take a hint from WoW: the first ci
Well, maybe before throwing tantrums about people's supposed reading comprehension problems, it would help if it were clear at least to you what you're trying to say. Because
A) "made-up", "Which means your plan won't work", and "you won't be able to level your RR that way" mean it doesn't happen. At all.
B) "won't get you very far", "take forever to level your RR" and "very small amount" mean it does. Slow enough to not bother _you_, maybe, but they do.
If you can argue that a problem is "made-up" while arguing in the same freaking message that, yeah, it does happen but only slowly, then... maybe it would help if you made up your mind first, which of them it is. "Made-up" doesn't mean "it doesn't bother me", you know?
It's the difference between "I won't fuck you up the arse" and "yeah, but I'll do it only very slowly and it'll take for ever." The latter is somewhat less of a consolation when I'm on the receiving side of it.
My problem is that it happens at all. The very fact that some points are given around randomly, no matter at what speed, is what irks me.
The point that it would be faster to do RvR, is moot too, when I just don't give a flying f-word about RvR. It's one passtime I have exactly zero interest in. So for me it won't happen faster that way, because RvR for me won't happen at all. Ever. Under any circumstances. Which leaves me with a trickle of RvR renown points, and it is hard not to notice that it keeps going forward, in spite of not doing anything for it and not even wanting it. Slow, maybe, but it goes forward anyway, without any resemblance to any idea of fair rewards for equal effort.
It's that lack of any semblance of a coherent efforts-vs-rewards or fairness idea, that irks me, not just whether those arbitrarily distributed points go fast or slow.
And not even just by itself, but because that randomness permeates more aspects than just those renown points. When it's not this, it's the broken balance. Or it's the fact that the same tier of PQ in different area, and for the same player level and quality level, the rewards can be as much as twice better. You know, both are a two-hander sword for the same class, both show up as green-quality, and both are for the same episode of PQ, but one does twice the DPS and has better stats. WTF? Didn't anyone take the time to balance what "level 4 green" means across the board, or what? Or if I don't run into that, it's that contribution or effort in a PQ don't coordinate with the rewards anyway. Etc.
Oh, and BTW, the constant handwaving about RvR level 2 being some kind of a cut-off point, is technically false too. I have a character who got to RvR level 5 in about an hour, by just running around doing the PvE newbie quests. So whatever cut-off point there may be, it's definitely a bit higher than 2.
Its having more (and bigger) problems doesn't make the lack of any coherent balance plan disappear or "made-up". And it's not much of a consolation anyway. It's a bit like saying "well, she may be an alcoholic, but she's schizophrenic too." The latter doesn't excuse the former.
So basically all you're saying as correction is that I'd have to hit a key every 10 minutes or so while I watch a movie?
As a general principle, maybe, but in this case I'd worry anyway.
I've seen people before try games they liked lots. It generally ends up a bit of a one game affair. You may not have time to stay in one game 24 hours a day, or even the personality for that, but if it's a great game, you'll do _that_ new game when you play at all. If you can't afford more than 2 hours gaming a day, you spend them in that new game that got your interest.
Whereas here what at least the summary tells me is that... since WAR was launched, people started playing _other_ games more. I'd be worried a lot if I was the publisher of such a game.
The image it paints isn't "well, out hype had also benefited other games." It paints the more likely image that a few people were planning to quit WoW or whatever else, when WAR comes out, and they ended up not actually liking WAR. So now they're too bored to go back to the daily grind on WoW (you'll eventually get bored too, it's just human nature), they can't be arsed to play WAR, and are giving SP games like Oblivion or MMO games like LOTRO another try instead.
If you publish a game and the reaction it inspires in people is, basically, "ya know, maybe it would be more fun to play Oblivion the 6th time instead", you have to ask yourself what went wrong.
Basically there are two ways that the popularity and population can go in those first few weeks. If it goes steadily up, yeah, it's probably premature to say whether it'll stay that way. But if you're losing most players, that won't fix itself. You have to do something. Waiting longer to see the trend will rarely paint any other image than continuing to lose more players. And losing them to a 2 year old single-player game, is reason to worry IMHO.
Well, before I start, "better" or "worse" are a matter of taste, so no telling if mine matches yours. You can't proclaim that a game is, in absolute terms and for everyone, better than another, any more than you could proclaim Pepsi to be better than Coke.
That said, and to start with the punchline: I'm not particularly impressed with WAR. I don't find it "bad" as such either. It even had some good ideas and a nicely different setting, but it obviously wasn't even finished before shoving it out the door, and nobody even tried to give it a good polish first.
Yes, it has some good ideas, like the public quests. But even then it doesn't take long to realize that that mechanic could have been better polished and tuned. Especially in the early stages there are zones where you just won't have the people to finish them with, especially in the ones where it being underfunded resulted in, say, not having a freaking tank in the area or having been blessed with an enemy which two-shots a tank and a lack of healers.
What nailed the PQs collective coffin for me, though, was the realization that you don't even need to actually do them. You can farm the reputation for the rewards by just killing the thrash mobs for stage one, waiting for it to reset, then doing it again. It's not exactly a heroic feeling, it's more like a new take on farming mobs. It gets old fast.
Even if you did go through the extra effort to actually finish it, well, let's just say a lot of times it goes like this:
Rolling for loot...
You have ranked 1st for contribution, got a gold medal and 500 bonus for the loot roll...
Rolling for loot...
You have ranked 10th and get no loot.
Well, gee, it makes me feel so special.
But basically it's not even about loot, it's about "why do I bother?" You could be the guy who stayed on the edge and watched the others fight, and get a prize, while the guy who tanked the boss gets no prize. And the points-based rewards could be done just the same by finding a less popular PQ and grinding the thrash mobs in stage 1. Even if I go through the extra effort, there's not much reason to feel proud about it: someone else got the same rewards with a lot less trouble.
The same applies to other aspects too. E.g., PvP. I create my first char and within 5 seconds I get a message on the screen in big letters that I got PvP renown ("honour" in WoW lingo) rank 2. At that point I didn't even know where I am and what am I doing, so I'm like, "Huh? What did I _do_? Did I step in a dwarf or something?"
What happened is that if someone captures an objective in the PvP sub-zone of a bigger map, everyone on the map gets the PvP points just the same.
Again, then why would I bother with PvP? The best way to get PvP renown is to simply park your character behind an inn or something in the PvE zone and go AFK. In fact, leave it there while you see a movie or over night. Eventually someone will go capture the flag or something, and you'll get the points just as well.
It's just hard to take a reward seriously when it can be obtained by just randomly being logged in at the right time, even when AFK.
I'll take a wild guess and say that the root of the problem is a schizophrenic design, which can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a PvP game or PvE too. If you're serious about equally suitable for PvE-only players, then let me freaking buy _some_ stuff without PvP points. (I've found no vendors where you can even get a basic sword without the equivalent of "honour". And, oh, they even have the equivalent of talents bought with PvP renown.) If it's only for PvP-ers, then say that already and let the rest of us know we don't have to bother. But the "solution" of giving PvP points to everyone, whether they PvP or not, is neither here not there. It cheapens the whole thing for both.
For PvP, it becomes a meaningless reward that everyone else gets just as well. Why would you bother? What are your bragging rights, if everyone else runs around in the same PvP gear and has th
1. How about, because if you replace it with _anything_ else, it is already illegal? It's called counterfeiting.
Let's give up on the car example, and use something where similarly the price is mostly a function of how much the market believes it's worth. Like, say, a Rolex. I'm the broker, dad has a Rolex, Uncle Fester wants to buy a Rolex. So now we have, as a direct equivalent of how the system works now:
A. Normal shorting: I swipe Dad's Rolex and replace it with a Chinese counterfeit one worth pennies, instead of an IOU. Nobody will know the difference, hopefully. I sell the real Rolex to Uncle Fester. (On the hope that later I'll be able to buy another Rolex cheaper and replace the fake one with it.)
B. Naked shorting: I don't bother with that, I just sell the counterfeit Rolex to Uncle Fester. (On the hope that later I'll be able to buy another Rolex cheaper and replace the fake one with it.)
The problem is: in both cases now there are two Rolex watches out there, when the real company sold only one. It not only devalues the status symbol for those who bought one, it also messes up the company's market.
And it's _already_ illegal. Why _wouldn't_ it also be illegal when the counterfeit goods are shares? Yes, we tollerate that for money, based on a complicated theory of why that multiplication effect is actually desirable and why we think we can control it. But that doesn't automatically mean you can clone everything else with impunity.
Do you see any aspects of the watch analogy that don't apply to shares? Technically speaking, even the dillution of the brand is exactly like that. A company issues a certain "brand" of stock. That's its trademark in the stock market, so to speak. By flooding the (stock) market with clones, I fuck up the supply side and dillute their brand too.
Except in this case (i) it can fuck a company up even worse than counterfeit goods, and (ii) there isn't even a way to tell which goods are counterfeit and which aren't.
2. And we're not just talking about creating more shares (the trader could just issue its own stock there, if they wanted to), but targeting a very specific company and deflating its shares. For both itself, and its investors. It's predatory in nature.
As another analogy: stock being sorta a different kind of IOU (you can vote to break up the company and take your share of the assets, for example), issuing extra stock in someone's name is really like issuing an IOU in their name... without even asking that first. If I'm the broker and you're the company, it's like me signing IOUs in your name. Which again, would be illegal if anyone did it with anything else than stocks. If I went and sold half the ownership of your house without actually owning it, you wouldn't argue that it should be legal, you'd want me thrown in jail. So why _should_ it be legal with stock?
3. As I was saying, the problem isn't that IOUs exist, but that they're indistinguishable from the real shares. (Except to the DTCC, but they're not telling.) In the bank example, you can tell which is the IOU and which is the money. In the shares example, you can't.
If I had an IOU for money signed by Refco, you'd know it it's worthless since they went bankrupt. If you had an IOU (marked as just an IOU) for Sedona shares, you'd know you didn't actually get the shares yet, and again they're bankrupt so you probably never will get them. You wouldn't show up at a shareholder meeting to vote with that IOU, for example, nor try to sell it back to Sedona if it ever bought it's stock back. But when they're indistinguishable, exactly that kind of thing can and does happen. In reality, if you have an IOU for Sedona shares issued by Refco, it looks like the genuine thing and entitles you to everything that a real stock does. A rogue trader essentially issued stock in Sedona's name, with all the rights that that entitles one to. And that is just wrong.
1. Unfortunately, "critically acclaimed" doesn't really mean much. It means that at least one reviewer wrote a glowing review, whether because he really bends over that easily for the publisher's ads and freebies, or because he liked the idea lots after playing for 5 minutes on God mode.
Anarchy Online was "critically acclaimed" and it was launched as an unplayable mess of bugs, with bad balance. It lost players hand over fist _fast_ and only stabilized after being turned into a freebie ad-supported game, and even then at a _pitiful_ number of subscribers. So not that many players liked it either.
Aiken's Artefact was "critically acclaimed" and IIRC it sold a pitiful 800 copies in the beginning. (Not sure how many more were bundled later in "top X games" bundles.)
Looking Glass's games were "critically acclaimed" and had such a rabid following that, arguably, it was the "OMG, Eidos killed Looking Glass to keep funding Daikatana" that broke the camel's back and triggered the devastating backlash against what would have otherwise have been merely a mediocre game with outdated graphics. But, funnily enough, Looking Glass had more rabid fanboys, than it had paying customers. Their last couple of games (e.g., the Terra Nova experiment) sold pitifully few copies, and even other publishers (e.g., Microsoft) no longer wanted to touch them with a ten foot polearm. Reviewers and fanboys ranted and raved about how great and innovative the Looking Glass games are, but people didn't actually buy those games.
So aiming for "critically acclaimed" instead of sales, is a bit like aiming to be the ugly girl with a great personality.
Now I'm not saying that DX1 was "bad", so hold yer horses. But if it didn't sell great, it didn't sell great, and that's that. I can see why a publisher or developper would try to change a few bits and see if it does better.
2. And part of its problem was that it wasn't really anything anyone could put their finger upon. It was barely even an FPS, but it required FPS skills to get out of a firefight alive. It wasn't a forced stealth game, but mostly you had to anyway... except when it wouldn't work and you'd be back to needing FPS skills again. It was barely even a CRPG, but it tried to tell CRPG fans that it was one. Then they'd need FPS skills or have to deal with forced stealth, instead of the usual concentrating on the semi-interactive storyline while letting the computer roll the targeting dice. Etc.
Now I'm not saying that _only_ FPS skills worked, but... let's put it like this: from all that bewildering array of possibilities for solving any problem, there'd be at least one point in the game where _your_ favourite approach just didn't work and you had to do something else. For each category of players, a different one.
Basically instead of catering to the union of FPS, stealth and RPG fans, it really catered to an intersection of the three sets. You had to be the kind of guy who enjoys all three, to go through the whole game and like it. Because otherwise sooner or later a section of the game would come up which forced you to do the one you dislike.
Now if you were indeed at least semi-comfortable with all 3, I'm not going to say you shouldn't like it. In fact, I'm happy for you. But, well, that's one possibility as to why it had only mediocre sales. Because it really catered to a minority.
And from that point of view, again I can see why a publisher would try to enlarge that target market segment.
Why bother with that, when there's a cow level in WoW too. It's called Mulgore ;)
The more worrysome problem there, though, is that the USA system (and probably a few others) works on IOUs that are indistinguishable from real shares even to those who own them. In your car analogy, essentially you'd sell the car, but when mom looks in her garrage, she still sees the car there.
But analogies aren't even necessary, let's look at the real thing. Let's say we have the following actors: Mr Investor who owns 1000 shares of IBM, Mr Broker who does the shorting, and Aunt Emma who's gotten into her head to invest her savings into IBM stock. Now the initial stages of shorting look like this:
1. Normal shorting.
Mr Broker borrows the 1000 shares from Mr Investor, and replaces them with IOUs. Then he sells the 1000 shares to Aunt Emma.
Hopefully temporary outcome: Mr Investor now owns 1000 IOUs for IBM shares, Aunt Emma owns 1000 IBM shares.
2. Naked shorting.
Mr Broker doesn't bother even locating Mr Investor, and just sells Aunt Emma some 1000 IOUs.
Hopefully temporary outcome: Aunt Emma now owns 1000 IOUs for IBM shares, Mr Investor still owns his 1000 IBM shares.
The problem, the way I understand it, is that in both cases, the IOUs are indistinguishable from the real thing by anyone outside the DTCC. (The big hub where those transactions take place.) In both cases, both Aunt Emma and Mr Investor can look at their portfolio at any given time, and they _both_ will see that they own 1000 IBM shares. Genuine shares, not IOUs.
In both cases, 1000 shares just became 2000 shares. And the effect can further cascade, as Aunt Emma's shares can be loaned by somebody else, creating another 1000 IOUs that are indistinguishable from real shares. And so on. At some point 10 different people can show up and demand vote with their 1000 shares each, but they're all the same 1000 shares, duplicated in that process. And someone can look and see the extra shares around artifficially inflating the supply on the stock market.
Basically to go back to your analogy, after all, temporarily Mom _and_ this guy own the same car as if it were two different cars. And the car can be further duplicated down the line like that, until the whole bloody neighbourhood owns a car each... and they're all the same car: mom's 2003 Saab.
I wouldn't have a problem with it, if the IOUs were clearly marked as IOUs, and not as real shares. Then either Aunt Emma or Mr Investor can look at their portfolio and go, "ah, I'm still owed 1000 shares by that guy." But they don't. They both see that they have 1000 shares.
I think understand the reasoning behind hiding those details. After all, Aunt Emma paid for her shares, might as well hide the details, delays and imperfections in the system, and just pretend that she owns the shares already. The actual transfer will happen in the background, all will balance out, and she doesn't need to worry her head with all that. Ain't life grand, when the system just makes things work in the background, and you don't even have to know when the actual transfer happened or how?
Well, yes, except when it fails. The more obvious way is when you still have the IOUs, but the person owing them to you just went out of business. Refco's fallout apparently left hideous numbers of IOUs out on the market, and nobody except the DTCC can tell which are real shares and which are IOUs. As long as the two are exactly the same for everyone else, it doesn't even matter if it was normal shorting (and Mr Investor is left holding the IOUs thinking they're real shares) or naked shorting (Aunt Emma is.) In both cases, some duplicate shares are left on the market, and are screwing not only the companies, but also the individual investors. But then there's obviously also the situation where the system is gamed and IOUs are just left around to accumulate, at either end, pretending they're real shares.
I just can't see how or why that kind of a system is even legal.
Except that's a highly subjective and inaccurate thing, as I was saying about moderation and reputation. My bullshit detector says that anything contradicting my existing bias is bullshit, and anything which confirms that bias must be true.
E.g., as a purely random and made-up example, an argument about socialized healthcare will register as "bullshit to justify stealing _my_ money" for the stereotypical die-hard right-winger, and as "damn right" for the stereotypical left-winger. An argument to cut down on healthcare and welfare and give more money to the rich, will be seen exactly the other way around.
E.g., "we're to blame 100% for the climate change and a bunch of people should die or live like in the middle ages to protect the planet" will register as "damn right" through the stereotypical carbon-cultist's "bullshit detector", and as "damn self-hating hippies are selling us their bullshit doomsday scenario again" by the stereotypical GW denialist. Conversely, an opinion column saying basically, "no, it's not happening and NASA has been massaging the raw data to create the impression of an accelerated climate change", will register as the exact opposite for both.
And yes, I'm talking extremes of either view here, for example sake.
Is either right or wrong about it? In effect they're both using their existing biases as "bullshit detector". It's not as much detecting bullshit as self-reinforcement. A news source or piece of news seems reliable, if it tells you or me what we want to hear.
And what do you do for news that don't even fit that? Stuff like that Steve Jobs had a heart attack, which is what we're talking about here, doesn't easily fit any ideology. (Except maybe for a couple of extreme pro- or anti-Apple fanboys.) It's not obvious what kind of a bullshit detector could call that BS. It's stuff that _could_ happen. People die of heart attacks every day.
Well, the problem with citizen journalism is that, pretty much by definition, you don't know who's who. It could be
- a concerned citizen who's done his research, but equally it could be
- a traditional journalist trying to get more street cred to his newspaper views (see the story about that guy editing Wikipedia about naked shorting,)
- an idiot talking out the arse,
- a zealot on some holy crusade, and who already found his "Truth" and all that remains is to spread the word to the ignorant masses. And for whom no lies, fallacies, FUD, disinformation or hyperboles are too low to be used in that holy goal. (And not just lonely nerds. Whole think-tanks exist who make propaganda their only mission.)
- a paranoid schizophrenic who takes his own imagination for reality (and I mean paranoid schizophrenia as in, the medical meaning: the kind that comes with realistic delusions),
- a shill (PR disguised as news, astroturfing and pseudo-word-of-mouth buzz-building are still popular devices),
- someone trying to manipulate another company's stock (own before selling some, or the stock of someone he wants to buy stock in),
- a joker who isn't funny enough to be clear that he's joking (just look on Snopes for some fine examples of joke news which then got taken seriously by too many people. Or I've seen at least one serious article, which linked to a The Onion story as source,)
Etc, etc, etc.
So going, essentially, "yeah, well, but that was one of the _other_ guys, trust us not him" is handwaving, as long as you can't tell who's who. For the outside guy, they all look the same. And they all claim they're the genuine article, and some _others_ are the ones you shouldn't trust.
Even reputation, people linking to it, posts confirming it, etc, are meaningless. For a start, we're in the golden age of sockpuppets. Also, things which are blatantly false for anyone with even a modicum of education, routinely get modded up "Informative" even on Slashdot, and conversely textbook quotes routinely get modded down. Or look at how "pundits" like Dvorak make a living and are read by a ton of people as great IT information, even though he's the same guy who had a whole article along the lines of, "my idle process in windows is using up 99% of the CPU cycles! That's why my windows is sluggish!"
Journalism reputation (online or old press, equally) is more of a question of saying the things a given crowd wants to hear, than anything even vaguely resembling truth value or quality. Or a matter of sounding like some knowledgeable guy giving a free lecture, even if you don't actually know jack shit about the topic. Again, see half those IT "pundits", but also a good number of posts right here on Slashdot.
Even credentials are routinely faked (see, 14 year old kids posing as some Ph.D.) or bought. Either from some diploma mill, or just finding someone with a Ph.D. title to sign your PR piece. Corporate PR uses the latter kind quite extensively. There'll always be someone who doesn't have much of a good name to lose, and will take your 30 silvers to give science the kiss of death. Even with tongue, if you pay extra.
So who _do_ you trust in a medium where for each 1 genuine citizen journalist, there are 99 fakes?
1. Well, AFAIK a simple change worked perfectly for other countries, and in fact it's how the stock market has always worked in most places that aren't the USA. It's similar to what in computer programming you'd call "distributed transactions" or the ACID principle: the swap between shares and money happens simultaneously, and either both succeed or both fail.
In non-nerd terms: you don't get the money until you actually deliver the shares.
It's mostly a USA problem that you can sell IOUs. And the fallout is exactly the same that those of us programming databases already knew would happen when a non-transacted program goes wrong: Refco alone apparently left ridiculous ammounts of fake shares in the economy.
With the change of the swap being simultaneous, pretty much that disappears: you don't actually get the money for 1000 Sedona shares until you can actually deliver 1000 Sedona shares, and the buyer doesn't own an extra 1000 shares in the meantime. You can game on the delay, but in the end any transaction you can't deliver can be basically rolled back, leaving the economy to where it was before. Grandma gets her money back, sorry, couldn't buy Sedona stock after all. The broker didn't make any money in the end. Sedona doesn't end up with ten times more shares on the market than it issued.
Now I'm not saying it can't be gamed, but you can't sell what you don't have. You can promise to sell what you don't have, but at no point does it become something that looks like genuine extra shares.
2. Most of the world's economy works perfectly well that way.
It never ceases to amaze me the way the USA insists that any of their quirks are grrreat (and according to some, even _vital_) for a working system, and eliminating them would spell doom and gloom for everyone. Especially when perfectly good examples exist of countries and economies which work perfectly well without those quirks.
And yes, people still buy stock, even when it's impossible for it to be counterfeit. (Since your argument seems to be that without naked shorting you wouldn't buy stock for fear of it being overvalued.) I don't know about you, but I'd be _more_ inclined to buy stock in the next Sedona, if I know that there can't be a Refco flooding the market with FTDs and devaluing my portfolio to penny-stock.
3. It loks to me like shorting generally, whether legitimate or fraudulent ("naked",) does _nothing_ to prevent stock becoming overvalued, or even an outright bubble. You don't short stocks when they're _rising_, so it will do nothing whatsoever to prevent their becoming overvalued. It just accelerates the fall once they go a bit over the top. So instead of preventing a bubble, it just makes the crash harder at the end of it.
In fact, from where I stand, it looks to me like it might even encourage a bubble. Traders can essentially ride a company both ways, and make money from both its rise _and_ its fall. There is very little to discourage helping it become way over-valued, when it just means you'll make more money on its way down too.
What that means for the private investor isn't that someone is helpful and keeps you from buying overvalued stock which may fall later. It means that someone else is encouraging stocks to become overvalued in the first place and then helping _your_ shares fall faster when they fall, and making some money out of it. Essentially that mechanism means he can make some money by making you lose more. Exactly why _that_ would be more incentive to invest, is beyond me.
Yet at least once exactly that happened: somebody called a trader called Refco and told him to "mercilessly short Sedona". It's apparently on tape too.
It's hard to take an argument that no trader would do it, when at least one cheerfully did.
Additionally, the ones in the best position to do either kind of shorting _are_ the Brokers/Dealers. In fact, the only ones who can. So maybe they'd laugh if _you_ called and asked them to break the law for you (though, again, at least Refco didn't), but there's nothing to say they wouldn't engineer a company's death spiral for their own monetary gain.
Duly noted and thanks for the correction. Still, you're correct, I was meaning the more traditional kind of MMO, not the space sim kind.
Actually, there are quite a few of us praying for a good SF MMO. I don't even care much about franchise, personally, just give me something battery-, clip- or belt-fed already. That market segment is way under-represented. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against high fantasy setups either, but that market segment is already catered for.
Arguably, excessively catered for. I mean, if you look at the current MMO player base, about 99% is fantasy, and about 1% is SF or modern day. If you look at TV viewer estimates, the numbers are almost reversed. Unless someone can argue convincingly that the same people who like SF more on TV, somehow prefer high fantasy in a game, there must be a _lot_ of untapped potential market.
And if you think about it, it's not even that much competition they have in that segment. The problem of the SF genre so far was that it was half-arsely done. E.g., AO was launched as a festering pile of shit (read the Something Awful reviews, and know that they barely scratch the surface of how bad it was.) E.g., SWG had exactly one saving grace: its character development system. But otherwise an incompetent designer and an incompetent publisher ran it into the ground, and managed to turn the biggest franchise in history into a niche. I'd say "etc" at this point, but was there _anything_ else worth talking about in the SF MMO genre? I'm drawing blanks.
(Yes, there is COH/COV, and fun game it is, but it's IMHO not really SF. It's its own genre.)
Also about most people playing one game at a time, that is true, but that's only half the equation. The other half is that most people don't stay in a game for ever. Last I've seen a number, it was 6 months average for a MMO player. Then he leaves. (Of course, averages are averages. Some people barely play for a month, some hang around for 3 years, but the average is around 6 months.) You eventually have seen it all, eventually you get bored of doing the same thing repeatedly as endgame, and bugger off.
Before someone jumps in to defend it: I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's just that (A) nobody can afford to make near-infinite content, so you keep doing new things for ever, and (B) people eventually get bored of doing the same thing every day. You'd get bored even of chocolate cake if that was all you ate, day after day.
Basically the behemoth that is WoW is shedding bored players all the time, by the millions, and getting new players all the time. Same as any other MMO. And it also gets a big chunk of its old players back after a while, because they didn't find another game to their liking.
Someone could make a damn good living by just offering all the ex-WoW-ers a new home. Of course, then it would have to not suck. That's where most have failed so far.
The traditional model of doing a half-arsed effort and maybe patching it (to be even worse) later, is all but dead. WoW may not have been that original, but it took the time to polish the whole thing far beyond what anyone else had tried. (If they even tried at all, that is.) It set a new standard. Going back to a traditional half-arsed, launched-unfinished MMO, is like going from colour TV back to monochrome for a lot of us.
So making that net that catches those falling off WoW, might take a lot more money and talent than it sounds. And apparently more than your average publisher feels like risking.
But, still, at least theoretically it's possible. The "???" between "1. buy some license" and "3. profit!!!" is simply: "make a polished game, and don't shove it out the door a year too early." And I'd expect that eventually it will happen. Maybe it'll be Stargate or maybe something else, but eventually it will happen.
Dude, let's take a break and put it in context.
The original claim, that I was answering to, was that somehow the top level guys are the only ones catered for, and the mid-game is left to be boring. That's what I was originally answering to.
And I'm saying that that's flat out not true. That
1. there is less content for you to see there. Look at the surface of those endgame dungeons, or hours to see each once, or whatever metric you wish to use. There is less of it. Yes, you can do it more than once, but then you could also do the Deadmines more than once if you want to. Just doing it more than once doesn't make it more content.
2. _if_ you didn't like whatever there was to do at mid level, I still don't think many people will get extatic about the same things at the end. You still do the same basic things, you know?
3. yes, most people _do_ eventually get bored of that repetition. It's not even as much a personal opinion. Last time I've seen a statistic, it said that the average player stays in a game for about 6 months. (Some more, some less, but that's how averages work.) That's a lot of bang per buck, no doubt, but chances are you _will_ eventually get bored of doing the same things again.
I am _not_ telling you whether you should like it or not, and I'm not telling you how to play the game.
Do you have any problem with those 3 points? Well, then say so. But being subjected to some lame armchair shrink gig, based on someone's inventing outright falsehoods about me, is... lame.
That said:
I never said that WoW wasn't fun. In fact, I'm currently going through the low levels again with a group of 2 other friends who've made matching alts just for that. I don't find the end grind fun, but then I'm not doing it any more anyway. Do you see any basic problem with that?
It's outright silly to be fed the "stop crying about games you don't find fun (after you have played them for a long time)" line, when, you know, usually that's _my_ line. Trust me, I _know_ that any game who kept me busy for more than 10 hours (the average length nowadays of an offline game costing the same), must have had _some_ good points. Usually I come across as some kind of Blizzard fanboy, so it's kinda funny to simultaneously come across as that which I constantly criticize.
I just don't see how can anyone claim that only the level 70's are catered for, and that everyone else is some kind of second class citizen. You know, given hat there is less content for the former than for the latter. That's the claim I was answering to. Again, I'm certainly not telling you that you shouldn't like it. And I'm not claiming that the whole game is bad.
Basically: Address what I've actually said, not what you imagine, please. God knows I probably say enough actual dumb stuff to pick on as it is. No need to build a strawman about how you imagine me to be :P
Well, that's funny, 'cause our armchair-shrink friend was claiming it's _not_ for the loot, and that somehow I have some personality deffect that makes me fixate on loot. Maybe you can have a vote and decide if my mental problem is being for or against phat loot? It's kinda impossible to be both ;)
Dude, quit bringing up strawmen.
Dude, I've said _nothing_ about effectiveness of an individual or anything. I keep saying that what bores me is doing the same content again. But that somehow reinforces your belief to the contrary. _Can_ you read, or wtf?
Again, _can_ you read? I've said _nowhere_ that the game is badly designed.